Jeanne Thornton’s literary powers are deep and many; novelist, short story writer, editor, and co-publisher of Instar Books and Rocksalt Magazine. In 2021 she released Summer Fun, a period piece and epistolary novel set in the mid-1960s, inspired by Brian Wilson as he was crafting his infamous, legendary “teenage symphony to God,” the unfinished album SMiLE by the Beach Boys. Summer Fun was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction in 2022.

This spring, she released A/S/L, an odyssey of three friends who meet online as teenagers in the late 1990s who are also immersed in a creative quest: to code the greatest online role-playing game the world has ever seen. They are teenagers, they are invincible, and they cannot fail. Or so they all tell themselves and each other, and whomever else is in their online forum, the #teengoetia chatroom. They have never met in person, so their avatars are their real selves in the online world of 1998. We pick up with them in 2016 as they reconnect as adults in a world that has radically changed in the intervening eighteen years. Although it is also a period novel of sorts, the themes are timeless: Forgetting isn’t freedom, forgiveness isn’t redemption, and in life there are no resets.

Of Jeanne’s powers, her greatest might be her ability to take these specific periods and insular worlds and make them accessible to readers, regardless of our experience. And that specificity is what makes her fictional worlds ever more tactile and engaging, her characters all the more real. As someone who is not a writer, all writing to me is still kind of a magical act of conjuring. But of course, as an artist and photographer, I know that creation is about process and work. I had a great conversation with Jeanne about A/S/L. Her powers as a writer are rivaled only by her generosity in talking about her process and characters, as well as her preternatural wit.

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Ryan Spener (RS): The initial setting that A/S/L drops us into is a hyper-specific one: the late ’90s online chat room and user created video game culture. This is where your three main characters, Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith, meet as teenagers. Though this landscape was niche at the time, it has profoundly shaped much of our online experience today. Although I was only tangentially involved in that world at the time, I never felt overwhelmed or alienated by being dropped into such unfamiliar terrain, nor did I feel that your telling was inauthentic whatsoever. How did you navigate this narrative so that it was accessible for the uninitiated, but also rang true for the real heads out here?

Jeanne Thornton (JT): The specific chat room in that scene, and the very ’90s-online voice of it, is one that lives rent free in my head forever; for better or for worse I’ve compared it to a kind of native tongue. A lot of the voices there are based on specific people I knew then, and much of the juice in writing it came from imagining a party space with all those people present, giving them an activity (the “porno password” game which was often played on such evenings; I think we all got it from The Cable Guy), and letting them rip. I did a little bit of research and excavation—one of those old chats got randomly uploaded to someone’s ancient website and was still searchable if you remembered the right screen names to look up!—but far, far less than you’d think. My teen years were so online, and online in those days was shockingly text-based, so it wasn’t a huge leap to translate memories of text into fictional text.

Honestly the bigger leap for making the text accessible wasn’t the chat lingo but the video games. That was one of the biggest pieces of work that needed to happen between the draft I turned in to my agent in 2020 and the final accepted manuscript of 2023. I had to do something similar in my last book Summer Fun to reconstruct what it was like to record pop music with the Wrecking Crew at Gold Star in 1966 or whatever, but there I had a key advantage, which is that everyone kind of knows what that music is supposed to sound like. We’ve all been in a van or something with a radio blasting “Good Vibrations,” but not everyone knows what it feels like to be Link or Tifa or the new girl in Stardew Valley.

Part of the key to writing it effectively was realizing that those are all very different bodily experiences—meaning it feels viscerally different to play as Link, to engage with the world as Link does, than it does to play as a white mage in the Light Warriors team of the first Final Fantasy NES games. How you move, what you can do, where the tension and possibilities for action come from: It’s just different. At some point I figured out that I could put that into body terms. I’m not sure where that came from—it probably has a lot to do with transness, and maybe also with drug writing? Unclear.

RS: “A transsexual is inherently unstable; she is someone who yanks herself out of her context and plants herself in altogether different soil,” Lilith thinks to herself while making pasta toward the beginning of the novel. “No transsexual’s roots can ever be as strong as a cis person’s. We are built to betray. … This was silly, she thought. She had no intention of betraying the cis people. And one day, if she worked very hard, she knew they would see that.” Lilith is thinking about her interactions at her job as a loan underwriter at a bank, but specifically her boss, Ronin, a cis white man whose want for camaraderie with her may or may not be professional. One of the things that struck me the most was the way in which Lilith’s gamified thinking as an adult built a framework within the novel for discussing how the trans world perceives the cis world, as well as vice versa. Can you talk a bit about writing Lilith’s character?

JT: At some point fairly late in the process of working on the book—and actually my realization about this came pretty directly out of a little project we were both involved in in the early COVID years called Instar Radio, if you recall!—I realized that the key to Lilith, and really all three of these characters, is her neurodiversity. The specific way she wants to relate to the world through rules and best practices—in a very similar way to Sash, honestly—is key to understanding the flavor of her efforts at assimilation. And this was yet another answer to the question of “what it feels like to be in a video game,” perhaps because our whole society now feels like what it’s like to be in a video game. Lilith knows there are rules for being a good trans woman in a cis workplace setting, so she’ll try to get good at this game.

In life, one of the tricky things about reckoning with my own neurodiversities and my not great ways of coping with them—and one past coping strategy has been trying to conceal them, refusing to own them—is remembering that there were good reasons for the early choice to conceal that stuff. That also tracks with transness. There is some sense—and over the years it’s less that this has gone away for me, more that it’s easier to forget it for longer periods—that by being trans in public in America, you’re doing something kind of like shoplifting, or like eating with your hands at the mashed potato cafe. You’re sort of counting on no one calling you out about this behavioral rule that—and this is key—you at one point also learned was wrong. Both you and the cis people had the same lessons that acting trans is not a thing good people do. There are lots of parallels to religious upbringing: Even when you reject it, it haunts you. But you do have to reject things that no longer serve you, whether that’s a religion that hurts you, or cisness, or masking your neurodiverse ways of being. This is maybe what the lines you’re talking about are getting at: If you uproot yourself in these ways, you are less stable, because roots are stable (until they rot).

Professionalism is like major league masking. There is a time when being trans was inherently not professional, when being autistic was inherently not professional. On my worst days I can’t get outside of thinking things like this. Lilith is written out of that energy. She lives by strategy; she views strategy as the best chance for connecting with other people, and lots of her strategies she first learned in video games. Everyone learns strategy from somewhere, right?

I will say that the less I try to approach social institutions and other people from a place of strategy—from a need to manage the encounter, because there will be a price for not doing that—the better and realer my world and relationships get. Yet the price is real, too, and Lilith, a banker, knows about price.

RS: A/S/L is a period piece set in two distinct periods: 1998 and 2016. In 1998, Sash imagines what adulthood might be like as she is planning CraftQCon, an imagined symposium for herself and her business partners Lilith and Abraxa, with whom she is producing the “Saga of the Sorceress,” and other fellow coders working on their own games. She figures being a grown-up will probably most closely resemble the party scene from the 1995 film Hackers. The reality of 2016 is, sadly, something else entirely. And now in 2025, 2016 is also distinctly in the past; full of its own promises lost and remembered and terrifying harbingers for where we are now.

What was the writing process like for you in this regard? From the time this novel was conceived until the time it was completed, how did your perspective on these timelines shift and how did that shape the book?

JT: For all my books, I make sure the setting is the first year when I actually start writing the text. The goal is to have some kind of stable point in which to anchor the plot and what’s possible to the characters: Like if I’m writing a story in 2007 and smartphones start showing up mid-draft in ways that will decisively change the plot, I can just not introduce them, right? Simple as.

So this book started in 2016, and the plot had to run from September to March 2017. Obviously this ran me right into Donald Trump. I wrote the scene where Lilith reacts to the election and processes it over the phone with Fionna in real time, I think just a week after the election. The chapters in the book before that were drafted in the Obama years; the rest of the book is Trump I.

I was revising quite heavily from 2020 to 2024, the whole Biden presidency basically, and the whole time I kept thinking about how quaint the Trump chapter had started to feel to me, even how antiquated. Lilith and Fionna had so much terror and anxiety about it – was that really what it had felt like? It was bad, sure, but how bad had it been really—other than the trucks of dead people in New York City and January 6 and such, we’d made it through, right? Democracy was staggering, but it hadn’t actually cratered yet, had it? I never expected that part of the book to become relevant in quite that way again, especially so intensely and at the moment of publication.

I’m glad there’s some record in the form of this chapter of what a literal scar that moment was, such a vinyl. I made a conscious choice at some point not to smooth that chapter out, to let it stay pretty much as it had been, with all the compound effects on the tone of the rest of the novel it creates.

At the end of the book, one character forgives another—her power to do that depends on her power to perceive. This is a power which novels grant all of us.

RS: At the A/S/L launch in April at Hive Mind Books in Brooklyn, the discussion turned toward the Fionna character in the novel, to whom you showed a lot of sympathy, much more so than many in the audience who had already read the book! Fionna is, in short, a straight cis white woman whose loan application for a community space Lilith is dealing with at her bank. The Fionna character rides the line between ally and magical cis savior, who comes off as oblivious to the cruelty of humanity until Trump defeats Clinton in the 2016 election, at which point she seeks to aggressively share in, almost internalizing, what she perceives to be Lilith’s victimhood. Talk a bit about your approach to writing that character. She’s complicated; her intentions are noble perhaps, but her execution is cringe at best, and selfishly pathological at worst.

JT: So I have to push back on this sentence passed on Fionna! Specifically because of the split you define between her intentions and her execution. That’s certainly true (though I balk at “selfishly pathological,” which makes me think of someone like Mrs. Jellyby, and Fionna just isn’t that). At the same time, the reactions people have to her are almost always outrage, yet almost no one has a problem with the book’s other major cis character, Ronin Mallard, Lilith’s manager at the bank, who over the course of years deliberately blocks her career advancement while lowkey creeping on her, condescending to her, and ultimately (spoilers) terminating her employment for reasons that certainly have at least a little to do with chaser shame. This is someone who is straight up villainous in a banality-of-evil way. It’s true that Fionna is cringey to Lilith because it’s important to her not to be a bad person to trans people—and this is, to be clear, a kind of interaction I suspect every trans woman recognizes—but Ronin actually harms, uses, and discards her. Why do we mostly give him a pass? Is it just that we expect it of the cis man, but the cis woman is held to a different standard?

The thing that I think people often react to most intensely in the book is Fionna choosing—and again, spoilers, but this is important—to take agency over the project away from Lilith at the point Lilith insists that they involve Abraxa, who’s been squatting in the community center space and who is undergoing some kind of intense visionary experience/psychotic break. Presented with this demand, Fionna initially hears Lilith out, says that she’ll try it, and then, once she’s left alone to consider it, decides she can’t hang with this plan. And maybe it is my inner Lilith who asks this, but: Is that a sin? Does it matter, at all, that Lilith has been lying to her about the project all along?

And maybe more crucially: Does it matter that I don’t know, if I were in this novel in 2017, what I might have done were I in Fionna’s shoes? This is one of the book’s crucial questions about how we live. Lilith is on an assimilationist path to trans stability: She risks, and loses, her job in order to stick with Abraxa, a trans woman who cannot follow her down that path. Because she does so, the church burns down, no one gets the healing center, and she has to start her career over from zero, if she can. Is it still worth having made the choice? And if you can’t choose the same way—if you do not love Abraxa enough to try, either through intracommunity solidarity or due to actually having been her friend online in the year 1998—is that a sin? What level of trying is not a sin?

All of this gets at your question about how I approached writing Fionna, and Ronin too. One of the best notes I got from an early reader was, in response to an early draft, that the cis characters felt one-dimensional, cartoon myopic villains—and importantly, the plot requires them to be such; they’re the ones with the money and the power to determine Abraxa’s fate. After that note, I did a lot of work to resist that plot gravity—basically I rewrote all the scenes with those characters, sometimes from scratch. I wrote scenes that aren’t in the book, too, including a lot of Fionna’s diaries and letters, fleshing out her relationship with her sister, details about how her politics grow over time, all the reasons she might care about a healing center specifically. Maybe some of my bristling when people talk about how Fionna sucks is just because I have spent that time with her that no one else gets to, and I know more of where her motivation to do these things comes from; I am still Pollyanna enough to think that even if what people do is inexcusable, there is some kind of power that comes from understanding how they unfold, what deep rivers the choices they make float up from. I wish I’d found still more ways to get that humanity onto the page, although of course part of what the book is about at its core is that we never quite get to see all of one another.

It bears saying, also, that the relationship dynamic between trans and cis women is one that I have very specific hang-ups about that certainly filter my work. This is true as far back as the very first story I wrote with a trans character in it, which was in 2005 for my MFA program. Literally only the professor I sent it to for a grade ever got to read it; it wasn’t something I trusted a workshop with even. It was from the POV of a cis lesbian meeting a trans woman, the friend of a friend, and the cis lesbian is trying to get through a social encounter politely while her head is just full of absolute seething venom. My professor’s notes on the story were mostly confusion: “Why does this narrator hate the transsexual so much?” I couldn’t answer this because the answer is the filter, but this is something I’ve never forgotten about and something I just have to try to investigate on the page. When people dislike Fionna as she exists on the page, it scares me really: Is that because of me? Is that the filter? How do I continue to dismantle it?

What underlies all of these rambles is a belief about what writing is and does. Pronouncing a sentence about a person, wrapping them up in your narrative, can be a very gracious action, or a cruel one, or probably most often both. The things I’m cruelest to myself about are the sentences people have said about me that at first, I reject and later come to repeat, mistaking them for private belief; I’m certainly complicit in projecting this outward too. There is a real power in writing down complicated feelings I have about cis people as a class—their myopia, the world they have built and its exclusions—but I don’t think this kind of messiness is specific to their thinking on trans women at all; it’s specific to any form of looking outward through a filter of power. But in trying to put that messiness outside into words, I create something that has ripples, too. The easy answer is that you can’t possibly be responsible for those ripples, but the truth is that you simply and ultimately are, and you must, I must, try to do better. I hope I have a little in the next book (which is mostly done! At least the text!); I hope I will have even more in the one after. I hope the next time Fionna makes a choice about what to do with the healing center, she chooses differently, too. The part of the book that I most believe in is that the main thing we owe to a friend is to try, and that has to be enough.

RS: “Every true first level in an RPG [role-playing game] was either the woods or a cave; it was not a suburb in Texas,” then-teenage Lilith thinks to herself while on a Boy Scout camping trip with her troop in 1998. Later, adult Sash tries to steel her nerve by thinking to herself, “If you see this as a game, you will be safe. Nothing bad can happen to you in a game.” Within A/S/L, the characters often let the video game realm bleed into their real-world interactions. Gaming is a sort of magic; astral projection divorced from tangible and plastic reality, and a form of protection. But there is also a flipside; the cruelty and abuse inflicted within a game to one’s avatar is also painful, “maybe online hurts worse than real,” Sash says later. One of the things I loved about this novel was the complexity with which it handles all these layered notions of self, and the idea that just because something is online, is virtual, doesn’t make the emotional impact any less real. But of course, this is all within the fictional realm of a novel, but one in which I felt very emotionally connected to and invested in the characters. What is the difference in your mind when writing characters in fiction and characters in gaming? Where do they intersect and where are they divergent?

JT: I have never been particularly good at writing characters for gaming! But let’s say, reductively, that there are two big approaches: the Final Fantasyone, where your characters are quite specific and have internality and backstories and such, and where you as the player are sort of joining the cast of a small theatrical production. Your job is to play your role well, to watch the play as you perform in it. The other approach is the Dragon Quest one: the stories tend to be picaresque, and although you have fleshed-out traveling companions, there’s always a character you play whose canonical name is usually just the number of the game, like Eight or Eleven, whose only lines of dialogue are YES and NO, and whose backstory is usually pretty limited to being from some town in the world and having some kind of fancy heritage that lets you shoot lightning from your sword or whatever. A blank slate into which you can project your own dialogue and thoughts.

Anyone who’s ever DMed a roleplaying game knows that players have minds of their own and will resist any kind of narrative or sense of motivation you want to saddle them with. You have to kind of grow that sense of motivation within them. Honestly, I think awareness of this is also key to becoming a good writer! I have a bunch of classes about writing characters and character motivation that are quite informed by experiences trying to write D&D modules for friends or silly RPG demos. This comes into play most obviously when writing in second person, where your brain is always dragging a little bit against the text itself—i.e., “You decided to go hunt the White Whale” is going to be a harder lift for your reader’s brain than if your text just pretends to be a guy named Ishmael who has specific, if bad, reasons for doing that—but it’s important when writing in any person. If a reader can understand a novel character’s want and the gravity of that want—what if feels like to be in that specific wanting body and mind—then they will catch some of that feeling themselves from the text, in the way that when you watch someone play sports, a tiny part of your brain is releasing sports endorphins into you too. If there is a material rather than spiritual substrate of empathy, this is it: Seeing pain we echo pain, seeing joy we echo joy. If a book can make you understand a character’s wants, you’ll want them a little bit too, and you’ll follow the winding path of words to see what comes of it. Similar to when the people in the town in the RPG need you to fetch the five enchanted logs to make the bridge, or whatever. I guess the logic of motivation is the same—the difference is whether the story is already written, or if it’s on you to fulfill it.

Regarding parts of the self—one thing that was important to me in this book was to have three characters who are each kind of bad at knowing themselves, maybe in the way we all are a little. This is one purpose of being not alone: having eyes that are outside yourself, that do not magnify the parts of yourself that want to either diminish or aggrandize you. At the end of the book, one character forgives another—her power to do that depends on her power to perceive. This is a power which novels grant all of us and that I find hard to imagine games doing in quite the same way—I’m not sure why! It’s something about the way a reader is outside a novel—we cannot affect it—and the player of a game never really is in the same way, and that has something to do with how forgiveness feels. I don’t know—I hope a more thoughtful game designer than me figures out how to do it.

Featured photograph of Jeanne Thornton © Rowan Levy